Tuesday, February 3, 2009

"03/02/2009 Yehuda Wgman, an Israeli instructor and expert on military doctrines and the Israeli occupation army history, wrote an article on Tuesday in the Israeli electronic site Ynet in which he said that the latest Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip was only a show of force in a bid to create to do the impossible – create deterrence without the risk of casualties. He also compared the Gaza defeat to the Second Lebanon War where Israel again faced almost all the failures of that war in 2006.

Wagman said that the renewed fire in the south marks the manifestation of what he warned of at the end of “Operation Cast Lead”. “At the time I wrote that only an absolute victory will create absolute victory photos, and that the Israeli army must complete the operation to the point of a media-covered expulsion of Hamas leaders from the Strip.”....

However, it continued, “shows are just shows, and because of it they cannot convince the enemy to change its ways. Changing the enemy's ways can only take place if an immediate and tangible threat is created against the decision-makers on the other side. An examination of Cast Lead's objective and the way it was managed shows that even before it started, it was destined to not only fail to secure the objectives that could have been reached had it been managed properly, but also to miss its original goal – "changing security realities." What does that mean exactly?”

“Those who thought that any kind of substantive achievement could be secured by merely demonstrating military capabilities show identical thinking to those who attempted to defeat Hezbollah via "effects" alone. With the exception of the highly improved performance of Israeli army ground forces, ‘Cast Lead’ suffered from the exact same flaws of "Lebanon Two." In both cases we saw blatant disregard to the basic rules of the military profession that prompted an inability to meet any reasonable target.”

Wagman said that just like in Lebanon, “in Gaza too those who managed the war attempted to achieve victory by declaring victory, instead of securing a tangible win; they attempted to win without casualties and to fight as though Israel had all the time in the world. Such fundamental strategic mistakes cannot be counterbalanced by proper utilization of tactical forces, as superb as it may be.”....."